Page 187 of A Dead Girl's Guide to Living
“Thanks for your help with the fireworks,” Dove murmured as she began to walk toward the driver’s seat, her hand slipping from mine.
“Anytime,” Jedd said with a grin.
I slid into the passenger seat as Dove slipped into the driver’s, turning the key until the engine roared to life. I watched as Liv nodded once, bringing her hands together, clutching them under her chin as she rocked on her heels, before she turned and walked to us, sliding through the backseat door and into the seat.
She turned, facing him as she gazed through the rear window, watching him as we began to drive down the long, manicured driveway.
I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Jedd standing in the driveway, one hand raised, his shoulders shaking. Liv raised hers too, pressing her palm flat against the glass, and for one sharp, unbearable heartbeat, it felt as if the world were split between leaving and staying, between holding on and letting go.
Then the turn into the road took him from view, and the Mustang carried us forward.
Dove drove aimlessly for a time,allowing the Mustang to crawl through sun-washed streets and palms that swayed in the breeze. Nobody was talking. Jedd’s street now far off somewhere behind us, but that last glimpse of him would forever be burned into the back of my mind. Him standing there with shaking shoulders, waving to someone he couldn’t even see.
I sighed softly and picked at a loose thread on my shorts. I felt Dove glance over at me, and when my eyes lifted to meet hers, she gave me a small, knowing smile before turning back to the road. She adjusted the side mirror with two fingers, angling it so she could catch Liv in the backseat.
“Hey,” she called back. “You okay?”
Liv let out a soft snort. “No. Saying goodbye is the worst thing in the world.” She paused, tipping her head back to stare at the closed roof of the car. “It’s not easy. Facing the inevitable. Yet it happens anyway, whether we want it to or not.”
Dove made a small sound in her throat. “Yeah,” she murmured. “I get what you mean now.”
I cleared my throat. “Are you ready for your mom?”
“No,” Liv said, her voice both sharp and gentle at the same time. “No, I don’t think I’m ever going to be ready. Not really. It’s just part of the inevitable that I have no choice but to face.”
“Okay,” I murmured. “What’s the address?”
Liv told me, and my thumbs felt too big as I typed it into Maps. The blue route snapped into place instantly, and I set the phone down in the cradle, my throat thick as I avoided Dove’s gaze. The voice directed, Turn left in 0.3 miles, as if where we were going and what we were doing meant very little.
We moved with the flow of traffic, the roads swallowing us as we became just another brightly colored speck in a sea of colorful specks. As we approached the freeway, Dove’s hand came to rest on my leg, and some of the tightness in my chest loosened, just slightly.
“Man,” Liv murmured from the backseat. “God, I just got, like, really, really scared. I have no idea what’s going to happen. Am I going to see a light? Is there a doorman or, like, a person with a list? What the fuck is going to happen once I do this?”
The fear in her voice reached for me, gripping my heart in a vise as I remembered what it felt like to think like that—when I thought the end was truly coming for me and there was no way out. The terror of the unknown, of what came after. It had been one of the most horrific feelings I had ever endured, because it hadn’t been mindless pondering but a very real experience I was about to face.
And now Liv wasinthat experience, and I wanted nothing more than to take it from her.
“Hey,” Dove said gently, her eyes fixed firmly on the road. “No one knows what happens when we die. Not me. Not Margaret. Not even the monks meditating on a mountain somewhere. We all have ideas and hopes and stories, but we don’t have certainty.”
I glanced at Liv’s face in the rearview mirror. She was frowning at Dove.
We pulled onto the off-ramp as Dove followed the softly spoken instructions.
“Was that a pep talk?” Liv asked. “’Cause it was horrible and not at all comforting.”
Dove laughed lightly. “I know. But if anything, there’s comfort in the truth that none of it is in our control anyway. Eventually, death is going to come for all of us, and what comes after—no one knows. People like to think they know, but they don’t. It’s unknown, and it’s scary, but there’s no hiding from it.”
We stopped at a red light, and I could feel my heart pounding in my chest as I watched Liv slowly nod in the backseat, accepting Dove’s words. The unfairness of it all began to claw at me. Jedd had hit the nail on the head when he told Liv that it might not be his fault, but he would always think about the what-ifs.
So would I.
I would always think about the amazing, big, colorful life Liv would have had if she had survived and I had died.
A woman jogged past us, a visor low over her eyes as her golden retriever ran beside her. Life’s most ordinary moments still happening around us. At this point, it felt more like an insult than a comfort, not when we were experiencing something so extraordinary.
The light turned green.
“She’ll ask why I didn’t listen to her,” Liv said in a rushed voice. “Just tell her that I was stubborn and trying to live my life. That I was never going to listen to her, and it wasn’t her fault.”
